I have followed one of my professor's suggestion and decided to install kanotix on my desktop computer.

But I have troubles booting kanotix successfully after installation, here's my situition:

My computer currently runs with a Vista System(32 bit).

So I have downloaded Kanotix Hellfire 2011-05 32 bit and burnt it to a dvd.
I wanted to keep my vista system, so I purchased a GoFlex Desk of 2T as my external harddrive.

So I boot my computer with live-cd and followed the guide here in partitioning my external haddrive and I have installed grub onto my external haddrive(The external haddrive is labelled MBR.) Note: In the process, I have never touched my internal haddrives.

Then I restart my computer, during bios stage I pressed F12 to make my external harddrive as first boot device.

Then I can see:
grub loading
Then the screen shows three options for me, one is to boot linux and two is to boot my vista with/without safe mode or something.

Now, I have noticed after the screen shows the three options, my external haddrive's power light is off! I don't know why and it is off. So when i choose to boot linux, it will tell me:
Device not found
No such partition

I suspect this is because my external haddrive drive is off thus it can't find the linux os to load?

I don't see why and I don't know how to fix it.(I actually spent two days just to come to this tage, previously, I can't even get grub to run correctly, i.e. file not found error.)

Hi sm66,
a warm welcome to Kanotix community. The fact that you are new to Linux should be no problem, everything should be easy enough

Unfortunately we have only a wiki page for normal HD installation yet. I will start to change that, today or at least tomorrow evening we should have a new wiki page that shows how to install Kanotix to USB HD.

Nevertheless installing to USB HD is quite similar to installing Kanotix to HD. The points you need to be aware of are only:
1. Choose USB HD as root partition.
2. Install Grub to USB HD master boot record (MBR).

I would suggest that you use another ISO for new installations. Acritox offers some new trial ISOs, they are mainly for testing but they are all in all in good shape and they contain more updates. You can find the ISOs here http://kanotix.acritox.com/taxonomy/term/1
If you do not choose the latest one of them (111115a) then it would be good to update the installer before installation. It got some better user handling and some small bug fixes. You can do that in a shell (black icon in panel) with the following command:

Code:

sudo apt-get update && apt-get install acritoxinstaller

Regards TheOne

PS: if the new wiki page is finished, I will post the link here too
PPS: just out of curiosity, at which university a professor suggests Kanotix?

Just side notes:
I have previously done the following:
1. Choose USB HD as root partition.
2. Install Grub to USB HD master boot record (MBR).

And somehow the external harddrive just seemed to be power off after starting grub. I do not know why and that's the main reason I am posting. I.e.after grub has started, grub can't find my external HDD to load the OS image.(I have tried "ls" and it tells me it can't find partition or it can't read (h0,msdos).)

Yes, I have removed the dvd and the only place grud is installed is the USB HD. After grub is running, (i.e. let me choose boot linux or windows), the USB HD's power light is turned off. I do not know why.

Hmm that is exactly the right way how to do it. Seems that the installation how-to is not your problem. Maybe something special with your external drive... on mine it works fine ... I will finish the wiki page and you can take a look at the screenshots maybe you missed something after all.

Also, I have tried numerous times without luck. Now I will try to install on another USB HD and see if it will work.

Sm66

sm66

Titel:Verfasst am: 16.11.2011, 03:35 Uhr

Anmeldung: 14. Nov 2011
Beiträge: 7

Thank you TheOne,

Like you said, it's my USB harddrive problem.

I have tried to install kanotix on my 8G USB HD(Another HD), it worked great.

Now from my readings online, someone mentioned that some bios can only recognize the first 8GB of an external harddrive. I am not sure if that's the problem either.(I have tried to use only 4GB out of my 2TB USB HD to install Kanotix and it didn't work either.)

Out of curiosity, what kind of USB HD did you test on? And how big was the HD and how big was the root partition?

Thanks,

Sm66

Kano

Titel:Verfasst am: 16.11.2011, 07:09 Uhr

Anmeldung: 17. Dez 2003
Beiträge: 16596

maybe try an usb key if it is the problem of your hd only. is your hd usb3?

TheOne

Titel:Verfasst am: 16.11.2011, 07:10 Uhr

Anmeldung: 15. Mar 2008
Beiträge: 610

Hi Sm66,

puhh I am glad to see it works now, because I ran out of ideas whats the problem here.

I used an 1TB big external usb drive. Cause there was just one big ntfs partition I shrinkd it to get some empty space at the end of the drive. That meas I created 2 new primary partitions (20GB root + 30GB home) after circa 900GB.

I think the problem here is the size of 2TB of your external drive.

Cheers TheOne

PS: sorry I did not get the wiki page(s) finished - if it works for you now, I will restructure the installation pages more to fit different kinds of installations

Hi Sm66,
I think the problem here is the size of 2TB of your external drive.
installations

Hi TheOne,

What do you mean by this? Why would 2TB cause a problem?

After more searching on the web: I found that my external HD (The brand is GoFlex Desk) may have problems of dismount/sleep periodically. Lots of people posted how their USB HD would sleep during data transfer or something on GoFlex support page.

So ya, which brand of USB HD are you using? Or you have any suggestions on that?

Thanks,

S

sm66

Titel:Verfasst am: 16.11.2011, 13:36 Uhr

Anmeldung: 14. Nov 2011
Beiträge: 7

Kano hat folgendes geschrieben::

maybe try an usb key if it is the problem of your hd only. is your hd usb3?

I have no USB 3.0 device yet, so I can not say if it works or not in combination with Kanotix. But Linux has USB 3.0 support since a long time ago, it was the first OS that supported USB 3.0. From Kernel side this should be no problem. Maybe someone in Kanotix IRC channel has more experience with that topic. Feel free to join us there